Herald Changelog
The latest updates at Herald.
The changes below are Herald additions and updates that are backwards compatible. In the event of a change that may affect your integration with Herald, you'll be contacted in advance to ensure you have sufficient time to adjust. Read more in our guide to High Impact Changes at Herald.
Herald Added Defaulting and Native Email Quoting
We've been focused on developing, refining, and enhancing our commercial insurance APIs. While this update provides key highlights, more details will be shared soon. Stay informed about the latest features and improvements, with additional updates to come.
Effortless Insurance Applications with Herald's Autofill API
Say goodbye to tedious data entry! Herald's new Autofill API streamlines the insurance application process by instantly populating Herald applications with saved business data. Whether starting fresh or completing a partially filled application, Autofill ensures accuracy while saving valuable time. Elevate your workflow and boost efficiency with seamless integration—try it today!
Herald & Babbix Introduce Native Quoting in Outlook
Email remains a dominant tool for insurance brokers, but manual workflows slow down the quoting process. Now, Herald and Babbix are changing that. With native quoting inside Outlook, brokers can instantly extract key data from emails using Babbix’s AI-powered tools, while Herald submits that information to carriers—returning a panel of quotes as soon as they’re ready. No more back-and-forth emails or manual data entry. Easily integrate it into your existing platform or launch a new offering with zero new code required. Watch a demo here.
Business Owners Policy
Business Owners' Policy (BOP)
This week we launched our third line of business: Business Owners Policy, also known as BOP. In addition to having a lot of demand for this line of business, we were excited to work with an incredible new carrier as our first BOP product: CNA. Here are some of the new things we built to support BOP:
- We created new BOP risk parameters.
- We created a standard set of BOP coverage parameters
- In particular, we created the first set of BOP coverage parameters that relate to specific risk parameters. Building limits and business personal property (BPP) limits relate to risks at specific buildings.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to adding BOP as a line of business, we also expanded some features and improved performance of existing ones. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- We added support for remodeling contractors for General Liability.
- We Improved security measures around how we store sensitive API information in our database.
- We improved the sophistication of our periodic carrier integration tests. We run more tests, more frequently that allow us to identify changes in carrier response before they impact our customers.
- We improved our tests to remove false alarms when carriers take a little bit longer than normal to respond.
- We fixed a bug in our documentation that obscured all but one valid type in any object schema that used the “allOf” type.
- We updated our documentation to more clearly highlight the quick-start appendix.
Quickstart guide
Off to the races
Last time, we released a fake carrier and fake products so that developers could play around in our sandbox environment. This week, we took that concept one step further by writing a quickstart guide for developers who want to get started right away. This guide provides eager developers with the following tools:
- A quickstart token (that only has access to our fake carriers and products)
- Interactive examples
- A step-by-step guide with details about how to get your first quotes.
Spend less time in integration meetings and more time building great experiences for your brokers and customers!
A new toy in the sandbox
Encouraging developers to play around
We want to make it easy for developers to explore our API and see how easy connecting to insurance carriers can be with Herald. At the same time, we make sure our carrier partners’ products are only accessible to developers at approved distribution partners. This restriction has meant that developers who are curious about Herald have needed to wait for carrier approvals before they can start playing around.
This release, we launched a fake carrier called “Herald” that new developers can use to explore our API before they get explicit approval from any of our (very real) carrier partners.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to improving our ability to onboard new developers, we also added additional features and improved the performance of our API. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- We added support for Trucking class codes in our General Liability product line
- We updated our internal alerts to flag when requests are made on behalf of producers who don’t have access to any products in a submission. These alerts will help us improve our customer support and maximize the number of quotes our distribution partners receive.
- We fixed a bug where in some instances limits were returned as a string rather than an integer.
- We updated the names of some risk parameters to improve clarity. For instance, we updated the parameter for the name of an individual at the insured who should be contacted about the policy from “insured name” to “insured contact name.”
- We improved the “data coercion” for the General Liability Products and Completed Operations Limit so that applicants receive the closest possible policy to the one they requested.